Wisecracks from behind the wheel #13

When the right lane is moving faster than the left in peak traffic, there could be an eighteen-wheeler plodding along in the left lane because its driver does not want to be seen with the smaller turtles on the right.

An aerial sunrise

Red-eye flights become almost bearable when you land to such a glorious sunrise!

"Spare" me the doughnut!

Automobile technology is constantly changing, adding features supposedly for our enhanced comfort, and convenience. As an afterthought, safety.

Why is it always just lip-service to safety? Take the case of the spare tire, sometimes called a "donut". This is an "innovation" to better all innovations: 

(a) It reduces the size of the spare, which means it costs less to manufacture and boosts profits. Ca-ching! Ca-ching!

(b) It takes up less space in the back of the car. "Look how spacious the storage area is! Definitely worth the price-tag!"

(c) It marginally increases fuel efficiency due to the infinitesimal drop in weight. That's (a) and (b) combined! 

Throw on a few more buzzwords like All-Wheel Drive (AWD), Anti-lock Braking System (ABS), etc., and you've got yourself a cash cow. Who wouldn't pay upward of $30,000 for such a high-tech gizmo, especially in snowy places like New England and Canada?

Rewind to just a few days ago. A tire on our SUV unexpectedly blew out on a paved street. AAA swapped it out for the spare. And then it started snowing. Heavily.

All the AWD and ABS in the world did not help keep the car from slipping and sliding along the highway on the way back home, in poor visibility. So much for safety. 

From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Definition of afterthought 

1: an idea occurring later

2: something (such as a part or feature) not thought of originally : something secondary

But the saga continued. We kept driving the car with the donut while we frantically looked to have the regular tire replaced. Here are some of the challenges we faced:

1. The replacement tire had to be similar to the other three on the vehicle. Many places were back-ordered for this item.

2. Because of the AWD, the replacement tire had to be similar in wear to the other three. Worse, if the other three tires were worn beyond a certain level, I'd have to replace all four tires!

3. The weekend intervened, putting paid to any hope of a quick fix.

Through a minor miracle, the above three aspects were navigated come Monday. The tire, which had been ordered the previous Friday, showed up at the tire center. The staff mounted it onto the rim despite their super-busy schedule. "You do know this is the busiest time of the year for tire work?"

But as the day wound down, they could not find five extra minutes to bolt the tire onto the vehicle! A bizarre situation in which the staff were willing to spend more than five minutes explaining why it could not be done that day!

They don't call it the service industry for nothing!

I had to drive the car back home with the donut on. And back to work the next day. But not to the tire center this time. The friendly mechanic around the corner found the elusive five minutes within half an hour of my dropping the car off, and saved me from more unhealthy donut-eating.

What a surreal experience all around! Pay good money for a safe car, only to be disillusioned when you need it the most.

Off with the donut, I say! The spare should be a regular tire and rim. We already know that donuts are not good for our health. Now I know it also includes my mental health.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Feast on Boston's get-out-of-here traffic the Tuesday before Thanksgiving:

Wisecracks from behind the wheel #12

You find out how slow a speed of 20 mph really is, when you are stuck (on your way to work) behind someone crawling at that speed on a 35 mph stretch of road with over-taking prohibited.

Wisecracks from behind the wheel #11

A winding road with many bends and turns is good for momentarily shielding your eyes from the unnecessarily bright LED headlights following you in the dark.

"Drive like your kids live here"

To those who put up these signs along the side of their streets, I say:

"Walk (your dog) like your kids drive here."

You cannot have one without the other. Be a responsible pedestrian!

Wisecracks from behind the wheel #10

When you feel entitled behind the wheel, lanes in both directions become exclusively yours (and even when they are separated by yellow lines).

Wisecracks from behind the wheel #9

Your alternate route will only have one lane in each direction, and it will be sprinkled with peak-time tree-work and/or speed limit huggers.

The pride of Boston

How to turn adversity into prosperity:

“Come to Massachusetts to test your cars, we have bad roads, worse weather, even worse drivers,” Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack pitched self-driving car companies this past June upon the regional expansion of the test program.

The above words are from a Boston.com article extolling the virtues of testing autonomous vehicles in the infamous environs of this great city...

Wisecracks from behind the Wheel #8

The best way to respond safely to an urgent text message is to do so while stopping right in the middle of the travel lane, while rush-hour traffic backs up behind you. The presence of a nice, quiet local street just to the right is not an option to pull over for texting purposes.

Wisecracks from behind the Wheel #7

The only empty parking space in sight will be unusable because of the inconsiderate parking job on an adjacent space:

The Boston subway's green line

I recently read an interesting article on how the first electric trolley system was demonstrated in New York City, but an accident happened and the locals balked. So the inventor brought it to Boston instead.

It is the oldest subway line in the US.

And on most days, it feels like it is the oldest subway line in the US. Choose any performance metric, and the numbers are likely to be similar to those back in the day.

So please stop giving them new reasons to blame their incompetence on!

Wisecracks from behind the Wheel #6

When the traffic light finally turns green, the driver at the head of the queue will be buried in a phone and will not move for about 5 seconds.

Transportation system resilience

Or lack thereof. How can a power outage cause gridlock on a freeway?

A transformer explosion along an interstate brought down electrical wires that shut down both sides of a major section of I-495 for hours on end. Just in time for the evening commute! This is an on-going nightmare:

Click on the image to view the disabled highway's dashed-line theme in fine detail...

When is it rush hour in Boston?

I seriously believe that the term "rush hour" should be banned. It is so last-century. Today, we have "rush hours" (note the plural) that tend to the "rush day" in the limit.

I charted Google Traffic's travel time estimates for my commute back home yesterday, by sampling from the website at sporadic time points in the afternoon. Here is the result for potential departure time points ranging between 2:15 PM and 6:00 PM, on a Monday afternoon:

The starting point is just west of Boston, inside Route 128/I-95. The end point is roughly 21 miles north-west of there.

The free-flow time for this trip is about 30 minutes, which is reported by Google around 2:15. But it goes downhill fast from there, reaching a maximum of 56 minutes... yes, nearly an hour, at about 3:15.

If I want to have a decent commute back home, I need to leave work by 2 o'clock. Or, wait until about 7 o'clock! Wow, what level of service! What quality of life!

It should be noted that the above times are those reported by Google, which (in my experience) systematically under-estimates the level of congestion. Also, these are instantaneous travel times, so leaving at 2:15 does not guarantee a 31-minute ride home. In fact, it is guaranteed that several minutes will be added to that estimate.

Tip of the day: Add at least 5 minutes to what Google tells you, and be prepared to add a whole lot more when Google realizes it messed up badly while guiding you onto the most congested way home!

Or, call me and we'll chat about ways to do better than Google. I have my bag of tricks, but do not want to reveal them to everyone and thus ruin my own commute :-)

Wisecracks from behind the Wheel #5

All alternative routes appear faster until you take one and get stuck behind a slow-poke who drives on both sides of the road and keeps braking for no valid reason.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

It wanted to see the world.

Here's the shortest way to cross the street: Circumnavigate the earth and take in the sights while you are about it!

I see you...

But I still don't care? With the profusion of such detection technology today, the only cause for badly timed signals is apathy!

 

Actually, there might be another secret reason: vested local interests who want to make it bad for "others" to drive down their streets.

Good, old-fashioned incompetence comes in a distant third.

Wisecracks from behind the Wheel #4

Entitlement: "I've got my morning cup of coffee, and I don't care how many others I block during their frustrating commutes."

This Prius almost got hit by a car turning left. The red truck then had to wiggle around him while we all waited for the light to turn green again. Thankfully, nobody rear-ended the truck during this entitlement episode:

Wisecracks from behind the Wheel #3

Any hard-fought travel time savings attained by switching routes based on Waze or Google Traffic information will be more than negated by tree work, construction activity or poorly timed traffic signals near the destination.

Wisecracks from behind the Wheel #2

When your fuel tank is nearly empty, the cheapest and nearest gas station will be out of order.

Wisecracks from behind the Wheel #1

You know you are in bad traffic when... your FitBit racks up steps while you creep and crawl through traffic so slow you could walk faster...

To turn or not to turn?

That may be the question, but the answer should be rather simple. According to the sign below, you cannot turn right between 7:00 AM and 9:00 AM, Monday through Friday. The reason for the sign is clear: the residents who live on this street are {miffed, irritated, annoyed, inconvenienced, angered} by the handful of cars that go down it to bypass the traffic mess on the numbered route nearby.

However, the large sign did not stop one motorist from executing the prohibited maneuver recently, only to drive a bit further up and turn into a driveway.

Do as I say, not as I do.

If the residents of this fancy street used their clout (financial, political, etc.) to have this sign put up, then they should be ready and willing to follow the rule themselves. If the alternate route is too inconvenient to these entitled residents, then it's equally inconvenient to everyone else!

And if they use some of my tax dollars to maintain this public road, I have a fair right to use it any time I want.

DOS and the art of driving in Massachusetts

It is a morning ritual. The routine scan of a traffic congestion map a few seconds before stepping out the door and into your car in the morning. You must check the current status of bottlenecks, accidents, queues, etc. along the usual routes connecting your home to your place of work.

You take a few seconds to evaluate your options and quickly decide on a plan of action. But the information is imperfect: the quality of the congestion data is questionable, a fact borne out by days and months and years of trying to game the traffic nightmare. Even if it were reliable, it only describes what is going on right now. By the time you hit the freeway, the ground reality has shifted from under your feet.

What's to be done in such cases?

MS DOS to the rescue! After all these years, it appears that the now-nostalgic (but then-frustrating) monochrome message captures today's driver routing decision process very well:

 

Indeed. When you hit unexpected congestion, you have three options:

(1) Abort the route, ignore the GPS device, and try to find a better way based on your own skills,

(2) Retry after hitting the GPS device and/or re-starting it to see if it somehow finds a better route, or,

(3) Fail in your attempt to get to work, execute a U-turn, and head back home.

How prescient that the retro DOS message even included the word "drive"?!

Today was an Abort for me. As is usually the case.

Journalism is a slippery business

New England grapples with another icy start to the day with the temperature just beginning to inch above freezing. Drivers are facing slippery conditions due to black ice, and the Boston trains are running late. As usual. But that's not the story for me.

It is the Boston Globe's reporting:

Quote:

Orange Line commuters are facing “minor’’ delays during the Wednesday morning commute while drivers across Greater Boston are black ice has formed overnight, creating potential dangerous conditions on the highways.

Unquote.

Looks like a Globe keyboard slipped on the black ice too.

I had to read that sentence a few times to ensure that I was not losing my marbles. I think it is time to administer the TOEFL (that's the Test of English as a Foreign Language) even to so-called native speakers of the English language.

My next source of entertainment: watching to see if the staff at the Globe will ever fix the above sentence on their website!

Audi you do?

I tried to bypass the traffic congestion on Route 2 in Concord this morning by detouring through downtown Concord and re-joining Route 2 further downstream.

Bad idea.

I first got stuck behind two heavy trucks with collapsible ladders mounted at the back. This was not too bad, though. Just when I thought I'd perhaps shaved a couple of minutes off Google Traffic's travel time estimate, I found myself two cars behind an Audi that had slammed into the rear of a car stopped at a red light.

Wonderful. 2-minute savings? Erase, erase...

The rest of my drive featured an entitled truck driver who cut in front of me in Newton, and a car that jumped through an intersection in Newton and immediately slammed on the brakes.

The icing on the moldy cake? Amazon has short-listed Boston for its HQ2 nightmare...

Fun times!